Resilient, Inclusive and Sustainable Environments

(RISE) grants challenge

With support from the RISE grants challenge, five projects across Central America, Eastern and Southern Africa and Southeast Asia are addressing gender-based violence in the environment sector. Scroll down to meet the new winners!

Resilient, Inclusive and Sustainable Environments

The new RISE 2023 call for proposals is now open!

RISE grants challenge

With support from the RISE grants challenge, five projects across Central America, Eastern and Southern Africa and Southeast Asia are addressing gender-based violence in the environment sector. Scroll down to meet the new winners!

About the RISE grants challenge

Addressing gender-based violence and environment links

The Resilient, Inclusive and Sustainable Environments (RISE) grants challenge is the first-of-its-kind to address gender-based violence (GBV) in environment contexts and climate-related sectors. Funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), RISE is a direct response to key research findings by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) on gender-based violence and environment linkages. Gender-based violence is used across environment sectors to assert control over land and natural resources and can be exacerbated in the context of degradation and biodiversity loss caused by climate change, extractive industries and environmental crimes; with women environmental human rights defenders experiencing targeted risks. Investment is urgently needed to implement solutions that address these serious risks, fill critical knowledge, facilitate cooperation and catalyze investment in this nexus. USAID and IUCN’s partnership through the RISE grants challenge directly addresses these key international development priorities.

Why RISE?

Building community

Winners of the RISE grants challenge contribute new learning to the global community on how to include gender-based violence considerations and prevention measures within environment programming. RISE grantees have their work featured by the Gender-Based Violence and Environment Linkages Center (GBV-ENV Center), access networking opportunities, and receive technical assistance to support the proposed activity in achieving measurable results and impacts.

In natural resources sectors and contexts, preventing and addressing GBV is critical for healthy and sustainable environments as well as for realizing women’s empowerment and gender equality outcomes. The RISE grants challenge uniquely identifies and implements interventions to reduce and prevent GBV in environmental programming and environment-related projects.

The application window for the RISE grants challenge is currently closed.

Shared learning

Building knowledge. Informing action.

Inspired by and grounded in the evidence base built by IUCN under its AGENT partnership with USAID, the RISE Challenge projects are now generating new information and learning that help enrich the knowledge base on GBV-environment linkages. Scroll down to learn more.

Meet the new grantees!

In celebration of International Mother Earth Day 2023, IUCN and USAID announced the five winners of the 2022 RISE grants challenge on 18 April 2023, in Washington, DC. With support from the RISE grants challenge, five projects across Central America, Eastern and Southern Africa and Southeast Asia are addressing gender-based violence in the context of environmental conservation, resource use in climate-vulnerable settings and the protection of Indigenous women environmental human rights defenders. Slide to meet the new winners!

Meet the previous grantees

Meet the past nine winners of USAID’s RISE grants challenge. These projects did critical work in Colombia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Fiji, Guatemala, Kenya, Peru, Uganda, and Vietnam. The activities were designed to address GBV in environmental contexts and generated learning and evidence on promising interventions. Read the RISE Challenge Report 2019-2022 for more on impacts and lessons learnt.

A collaborative effort of impact

The 2020-2021 the RISE grants challenge winners are supported to incentivize organizations to adapt and implement promising or proven practices that have been used to effectively prevent and respond to GBV in other sectors to environmental programming.

These rounds of the RISE grants challenge draw insights from other development and humanitarian sectors that have proven or promising practices to address GBV. It spurs partnerships between environmental organizations, local communities, indigenous peoples organizations, and gender and GBV experts who can help bridge knowledge gaps and work to build an evidence base of effective GBV interventions. Under AGENT, IUCN provides targeted and specific technical support while distilling and sharing experiences from RISE to inform environmental programming.

Starting now, in 2022, IUCN is running a new call for proposals under AGENT and the GBV-ENV Center.

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Stories on how we RISE together

RISE grantees are exploring approaches to address gender-based violence and environment linkages in environment-related programming, ushering learning along the way. Navigate to explore stories from RISE grantees about views and experiences: